DVD reviews
Immortals
"... a thundering example of style over substance."
Midnight In Paris
“...a delightful tribute to nostalgia and romance.”
The Illusionist
“...a film that generally brings warm smiles rather than belly laughs...”
Treasure Guards
"A willing suspension of disbelief should get most viewers across the line."
search the site
newsletter
Enter your email address below to receive the weekly Filmink newsletter
This Way Of Life (DVD)
Year: 2009
Rating: PG
Director: Thomas Burstyn
Cast: Peter Karena, Colleen Karena, Aurora Ottley-Karena
Release Date: March 11, 2011
Distributor: Antidote Films
The Film: 3.5
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“...an elegant amalgamation of social realist constructs and pure whimsy...”
This documentary is an elegant amalgamation of social realist constructs and pure whimsy, played out in the rarefied air of the rural Ruahine Mountains on Te Ika-a-Maui, the North Island of New Zealand.
Opening with Peter and Colleen Karena expecting their sixth child, the film spotlights their family's enviable if peculiar lifestyle, breaking horses and hunting deer on family land a century old. Their raven maned children run naked and wild, simultaneously in utter communion with nature and tethered to the real world of school mates and modern conveniences. They are all under eight years old, beautiful, precocious and entirely free of self doubt, riding horses bareback and helmet free into river rapids and helping their father butcher venison. And as Peter and Colleen's life unravels beneath them, the kids remain the centre of purity that maintains them.
Peter is a gentleman philosopher and a bit of a wanker, but by all measures a great father and husband, but one who is haunted by an unexplained conflict with his father. What appears something of a minor tiff becomes terrifying as the family falls victim to thuggish landlords, arsonists and horse thieves over the course of the doco's several years.
Director Thomas Burstyn's portrayal is one of almost suffocating intimacy, huddled with eight people and innumerable animals in a variety of makeshift homesteads, caravans and sheds. It is to his credit, however, that the film never veers into anthropologic twaddle and the family's lifestyle is treated as a choice rather than a better life than ours. It is in that subtlety that the film's appeal to the festival set finally becomes apparent.
